Week Seven Managing KnowledgeInformation Resourc.docx

Week Seven: Managing Knowledge
Information Resource Management
IT620
February 22, 2014
Running head: MANAGING KNOWLEDGE 1
MANAGING KNOWLEDGE 3
MANAGING KNOWLEDGE 2
Managing Knowledge
Chapter 14: Question 3. How do human capital, structural
capital, and customer capital differ?
ANSWER.
Human capital, structural capital and customer capital are three
basic fundamentals of any organization. They differ in their
roles playing for that organization. Human capital is the
efficiency of a human being on the basis of its skills; more the
human is skilled and efficient results in more human capital. On
the structural capital is the efficiency of the organizations to
provide environment in which they can increase the efficiencies
of humans working for them such as data, systems, knowledge
and designs. The customer capital is the relationship bond with
organization products, stronger the bond between the customer
and the products results in a stronger customer capital.
Chapter 14: Question 8. What approach did the energy company
take to encourage knowledge sharing among its 15 business

units?
ANSWER.
The approach that the energy company took to encourage
sharing among its 15 business units was establishing peer
groups from various units. The idea was to have employees
share his or her knowledge without the involvement of
leadership to avoid political aspects. Since this was
unsuccessful it was decided to provide a human portal for
employees where they can ask questions regarding the problems
they faced with their customers and employees from other
business units provides a solution to them, its kind knowledge
sharing between the organizations from different business units.
They also gave a chance to their employees to meet with the
other employees from different business unit so that they share
their experience for the growth of their particular business unit.
Chapter 14: Question 10. What three questions does Stewart
recommend be asked before launching a knowledge management
project?
ANSWER
The three questions that Stewart recommends to be asked before
launching a knowledge management project are listed as
follows:
Listing out the group that will use this knowledge space and
make them responsible for all the content they are going to post
on that knowledge space.
The type of knowledge groups was going to share on the
knowledge space and who will manage the context that the
employees were discussed on the knowledge space.
He also raises the question of the culture that the organization
is going to adopt, will that be composed of reusers or
originators because he stated both are different because a
repository of things promotes a reuse culture; an online chat
room helps originators, but this is not going to happen opposite.

Week 7 - Managing Knowledge
Due Date: Sat, Feb 22, 2014 11:55 PM MST
Write answers to the following textbook questions located at the
end of each chapter. Each answer should be approximately 70
words, or a total of approximately 900 words for all of your
answers combined.
· Chapter 14: Questions 3, 8, 10, 11, and 13 in the Review
Questions section
· Chapter 14: Questions 1 and 4 in the Exercises section
· Chapter 15: Questions 5, 6, 9, 12, and 14 in the Review
Questions section
· Chapter 15: Question 1 in the Exercises section
CHAPTER 14Introduction
In this chapter, we deal with two of the most important and
most talked about, yet still evolving, topics that relate to
supporting knowledge work. One is the subject of managing
knowledge. That means not only encouraging people to share
knowledge personally, but also putting their knowledge in a
form that others can easily access. Because knowledge can come
from inside as well as outside the firm, the final sections on
knowledge management deal with customer knowledge and
researchers’ knowledge and how to embed this outside
knowledge in a real-time system. Under this topic are the
intellectual capital issues of valuing intellectual property,
usage, and sharing knowledge.
The second topic is the vast arena of computer ethics, which
deals with such areas as information privacy, intellectual
property rights, and other legal and ethical issues relating to
information and knowledge. Many laws and regulations written
before the computer age and the Internet explosion are being
applied to today’s software, databases that house personally
identifiable information, and networks that connect different
cultures. The entire realm of intellectual capital challenges the

applicability of these laws and norms.
Consistent with the framework laid out in this text, we address
the problem of supporting knowledge work along three
dimensions: technology, organization, and environment.
Companies Want to Manage Knowledge
One of the enduring subjects in the IT field since the mid-1990s
has been knowledge management. Top corporate executives
realize that their greatest corporate assets walk out the door
every evening, taking with them another crucial asset,
knowledge. Attempts to capture knowledge in computer systems
continue. But for some experts and researchers in the field,
knowledge is not something that can be captured in a machine;
it only exists inside a person’s head. Information can be
captured in computers; knowledge cannot. Many feel that the
term “knowledge management” creates the wrong impression.
The term “management” often brings forth the “we can control
it” mind-set. Knowledge cannot be controlled or engineered, so
the mechanical metaphor is wrong. It can only be leveraged
through processes and culture. The biological or ecological
metaphor is much better. The more people are connected, and
the more they exchange ideas, the more their knowledge spreads
and can thus be leveraged. This view, of course, is still being
debated, and raises the question, “If we cannot disembody
knowledge, how do we better manage the knowledge within
people to leverage this asset?”
Tony Brewer,1a a researcher at Gartner, researched this topic
and notes that as we move from a service economy to a
knowledge economy, companies move toward managing their
intellectual capital in a more formal and deliberate way. In
essence, knowledge exists in two states, tacit and explicit. Tacit
knowledge exists within a person’s mind and is private and
unique to each person. Explicit knowledge has been articulated,
codified, and made public. Western management practices have
concentrated on managing explicit knowledge; but cultivating
and leveraging tacit knowledge is just as important. Effective

knowledge management requires transferring knowledge
between these two states.
How is that done? Well, says Brewer, because knowledge is not
a physical asset, it is not effectively described in terms of
manufacturing analogies, such as storing it in inventory. Rather,
it needs to be thought of in ecological terms, such as nurturing
it, cultivating it, and harvesting it. Furthermore, ways to
transfer knowledge back and forth between its tacit and explicit
states are crucial and are generally a result of encouraging the
free flow of ideas and information, something that
organizational norms, departmental boundaries, and national
differences can inhibit.
The process of transferring tacit knowledge to others is a key
part of managing knowledge. To emphasize this idea, some
companies have stopped talking about knowledge management
and use only the term “knowledge sharing.” In this regard, IT is
seen as one enabler, but not the main one. The key to knowledge
sharing seems to be getting people together face-to-face to
explain how they do things. Once people sit down and talk
about what they do and why, barriers fall, knowledge flows, and
sharing increases. Unfortunately, people are not given the time
or the space these days for this kind of interaction; free time for
sharing is not seen as important.A Model for Managing
Knowledge
Due to the increasing emphasis on knowledge, some now call it
intellectual capital to distinguish it from the other kinds of
capital that firms possess. Giga Information Group,2 a research
firm, has published a model for managing intellectual capital.
As shown in Figure 14-1, the model is circular and has four
stages, which represent what people generally do with
knowledge. First, they create it or capture it from a source.
Next, they organize it and put it into categories for easy
retrieval. Then they distribute it (push) or access it (pull).
Finally, they absorb another’s knowledge for their own use or to
create more new knowledge. Thus, the cycle begins again.
Figure 14-1 A Knowledge Management Framework

Source: Reprinted with permission from Best Practices in
Knowledge Management, Giga Information Group,
1997, www.gigaweb.com.
The four stages create three types of capital: human, structural,
and customer.
· Human capital.This form of intellectual capital consists of
knowledge, skills, and innovativeness of employees as well as
company values, culture, and philosophy. It is created during
the knowledge-creation-capture and knowledge-absorption-reuse
stages because these two stages focus on getting people together
to share knowledge. They deal with the people aspects of
knowledge management. Their main question is, “How do we
get people to have more knowledge in their heads?”
· Structural capital.This is the capabilities embedded in
hardware, software, databases, organizational structure, patents,
and trademarks that support employees as well as relationships
with customers. Structural capital is formed in the knowledge-
organization-categorization and knowledge-distribution-access
stages because these stages focus on moving knowledge from
people’s heads to a tangible company asset. These stages deal
with the technology issues surrounding knowledge management
and sharing. Their main question is, “How do we get knowledge
out of people’s heads and into a computer, a process, a
document, or another organizational asset?”
· Customer capital.This form of intellectual capital is the
strength of a company’s franchise with its customers and is
concerned with its relationships and networks of associates.
Furthermore, when customers are familiar with a company’s
products or services, the company can call that
familiarity customer capital. This form of capital may be either
human (relationships with the company) or structural (products
used from the company).
Based on a series of case studies, Giga discovered that the
human capital stages and the structural capital stages require
different mind-sets. Hence, companies have had to use different

approaches to grow each one; and the techniques for one do not
work for the other. The companies that focused on human
capital used touchy-feely, people-centric approaches. In some
cases, no technology was used at all. The companies that
focused on structural capital took a typical IS approach: using
technology to solve a problem. Little talk addressed individuals,
communities, and work practices; talk mainly centered on
yellow pages of experts, knowledge bases, and such. However,
to succeed in leveraging intellectual capital, companies need to
do both.
Now we turn to specifics of what companies have done to build
human capital, structural capital, and customer capital.
Building Human Capital
The emphasis in building human capital, notes Giga, is to
answer the question, “How do we get people to have more
knowledge in their heads?” Giga sees four ways: create it,
capture it, absorb it, and reuse it.Knowledge Creation and
Capture
This phase deals with generating knowledge, either by nurturing
employees to create it or by acquiring it from outside. Hence, it
deals with both human capital and customer capital. As noted
earlier, the Giga cases that emphasized this phase of managing
knowledge have used high-touch approaches, such as creating a
sharing culture, urging people to meet either in person or
electronically, and encouraging innovation.
As another example of what a company can do to promote
knowledge sharing globally, consider the approach that
Buckman Laboratories has taken. This description is based on
Brewer’s1a work.
Case Example: Buckman Laboratories
www.buckman.com
Buckman Laboratories, an industrial chemical company based in
Memphis, Tennessee, has some 1,300 employees across 70
countries around the world. The concept of sharing knowledge
and best practices has been around in Buckman for more than 15

years. In fact, the company’s code of ethics reinforces the
sharing culture. The company believes that successfully
transferring knowledge depends 90 percent on having the right
culture and 10 percent on technology.
To bring the knowledge of all Buckman’s employees to bear on
a customer problem anywhere in the world—whether in Europe,
South Africa, Australia/New Zealand, or Japan—Buckman
established a knowledge transfer system called K’Netix, the
Buckman Knowledge Network. The goal of K’Netix was to get
people who had not met each other, but belonged to the same
business, to communicate with each other and develop trust in
each other: trust that one person was interested in the other’s
success, trust that what one person received from others was
valid and sincere, and enough trust in the culture to help
someone else.
Ten years ago, sharing was accomplished mainly by people
traveling all over the world to see each other, with lots of face-
to-face conversations and meetings. Today, such meetings still
occur, but the technology helps people stay in touch between
these meetings, making communications more continuous.
When employees need information or help, they ask via forums,
which are Buckman-only online forums over the Internet. In all,
seven forums in Tech-Forum are organized by industry and are
open to all employees.
One particularly influential conversation, which set the tone for
company-wide sharing, took place over TechForum and
concerned Buckman’s global sales awards. A large cash award
was split among the top three salespeople worldwide; the top 20
got plaques. It was based on a formula that took many factors
into account. The salespeople, however, were unhappy with the
formula. When this discussion appeared on the companywide
forum, then-CEO Bob Buckman jumped into the fray and
decided that the entire company should iron out the problems in
front of all employees. Hundreds of messages were recorded,
and the entire award structure was restructured online in front
of everyone. It was a rare opportunity to allow everyone to

share in an important, yet sensitive, company subject.
Moreover, top management did not dictate the results. This
conversation reinforced the sharing culture.
The conversations are the basis for transferring knowledge
around the company. So the important ones are captured.
Volunteer experts identify conversations that contain valuable
information and, more importantly, valuable streams of
reasoning. This information is then edited to remove extraneous
material, given keywords, and stored in the forum library. In
essence, Buckman is capturing the artifacts of its virtual teams
in action. In so doing, it is creating a self-building knowledge
base, which can be used for what-if analyses and can be mined
to create new knowledge.
The prime benefit is timely, high-quality responses to customer
needs. For example, a new employee in Brazil was scheduled to
visit a customer who had a particular problem. The salesperson
posted both the problem and a suggested solution in a forum and
sought advice from anyone with more experience. A response
came quickly: “I’ve faced this problem and your pH is too high;
it will cause odors and ruin the paper. Bring the pH down by
two points. That won’t hurt the process, and it will clear up the
problem.” As a result, this new employee, who had only modest
experience, was able to present a proposal with the experience
of a 25-year veteran, and make the sale.Knowledge Absorption
and Reuse
This phase of building human capital addresses the notion of
getting knowledge into people’s heads where it can be enhanced
and reused. Irrespective of whether people believe that
knowledge only exists in minds or can exist in computers, the
Giga cases that emphasized this phase of managing knowledge
used high-touch approaches. They too focused on nurturing
interactions among people, recognizing the knowledge
brokers who exist in companies, and supporting communities of
practice.Recognizing knowledge brokers: “The Rudy problem.”
Simply discovering who has what knowledge is a step in the
right direction to fostering knowledge sharing. Yet, when

possessing knowledge is not rewarded by management, neither
is sharing, as the following story illustrates.
At a knowledge management conference, Dr. Patricia
Seemann,3 who headed up a knowledge management project at a
pharmaceutical company, told the story of Serge and Rudy
(fictitious names but real people). Serge, she said, was a “real”
manager. He had a three-window office, a big desk, and a title.
If you asked him what he did the past year, he would say, “I
registered 600 products in 30 countries.” Rudy, on the other
hand, is a headache, his manager says, because he does not
work. He just stands around and talks all day. Whenever you see
him, he is talking to someone. When you ask him what he did
the past year, he says, “I sort of helped out.”
The company downsized, and guess who got laid off? Rudy.
And then what happened? His department fell apart because
there was no one to help, to provide guidance. When they fired
Rudy, they fired their organizational memory, said Seemann. He
was a crucial, yet unrecognized asset, because he was willing to
share his knowledge.
While at this company, Seemann and her team created a yellow
pages guide of company knowledge brokers. Guess who was in
the book and who was not? Rudy, of course, was in the book.
Serge was not, and neither was top management. How can
companies fix what she calls “the Rudy problem”? One way is
to create a technical career track and promote knowledge
brokers. Giving Rudy a title would have made an enormous
difference, Seemann said, because it would have sent a signal
that knowledge sharing was recognized in the company.
Companies cannot appoint knowledge brokers. They just
emerge. And when they do emerge, they need support.One
approach to fostering knowledge sharing: T-shaped managers
If not understanding Rudy’s role in the organization is how not
to foster knowledge sharing, what is a way to nurture it? Morton
Hansen, of Harvard Business School and Bolko von Oetinger, of
Boston Consulting Group4 propose what they call T-shaped
managers. These are executives who have both a vertical role

(such as running a business unit) and a horizontal role (such as
sharing knowledge with their peers in other business units).
The goal of this structure is to circumvent the limitations of
knowledge management systems: They can only house explicit
knowledge (not implicit know-how); they cannot foster
collaboration by just making documents available, and their
directories of experts can get out of date quickly. T-shaped
management is especially important in organizations with
autonomous business units because it helps counterbalance their
tendency to compete with each other and hoard expertise.
Whereas the value of T-managers’ vertical work is measured by
traditional bottom-line financial performance, the value of their
horizontal work is measured in five ways, note Hansen and von
Oetinger:
1. Increased company efficiency from transferring best practices
among business units
2. Better decisions by soliciting peer advice
3. Increased revenue by sharing expertise, again, among peers
who are experts in areas in question
4. Development of new business ventures by cross-pollinating
ideas
5. Moving strategically through well-coordinated efforts among
peers
However, success in these five areas does not just happen.
Knowledge sharing requires clear incentives. The company
needs reward sharing. Furthermore, sharing needs to go both
ways—give and take. Benchmarking across business units can
encourage underperformers to ask for help. Success also
requires formalizing cross-unit interactions. It does not mean
creating bureaucracy, but rather creating peer-level collegial
support (and confrontation). It also means picking and choosing
which cross-unit requests to fulfill based on expected business
results and how much someone can really contribute.
BP is exemplary in its use of the T-manager concept, state
Hansen and von Oetinger. The insight Hansen and von Oetinger
learned from studying BP is that mechanisms must be put in

place to both foster and guide managers’ knowledge-sharing
activities; otherwise, they start to take up too much time and
produce few results.
Case Example: BP
www.bp.com
BP is in the energy business. It merged with Amoco in 1998,
with ARCO in 2000, and Castrol and Veba Aral in Germany in
2002; it now has 100,000 employees in 110 countries. BP’s
approach to T-shaped management began in the early 1990s in
BPX, its oil and gas exploration division. To cut layers and
increase accountability, John Browne, then head of BPX and
now head of BP, divided the division into 50 autonomous
business units. Unfortunately, each business unit head focused
only on his or her unit, not on BPX.
To get the business unit heads working together, Browne
instituted peer groups in 1993, each with about 12 business unit
leaders in similar businesses. No bosses were allowed in these
peer groups, so the discussions would be candid and not consist
of political posturing. Sharing did increase, but it was not until
1994, when these groups were made responsible for allocating
capital within their group and for setting their performance
levels, that their sharing started to truly impact BPX’s
performance. The peer group members finally saw the financial
value of sharing expertise. When Browne became CEO in 1995,
he instituted peer groups BP-wide.
BP has also created cross-unit networks around areas of shared
interest. However, BP found, unfortunately, that these several
hundred networks cost a lot of time and money (with people
flying all over the globe) without resulting in better results.
Thus, the number and use have been limited.
BP has also instituted the practice of identifying a limited
number of “human portals” who connect people, so that
everyone is not trying to network with everyone else. Typically
these people are not the top executives, note Hansen and von
Oetinger, and typically they have been at BP a long time and in
many jobs and locations.

IT plays a role in these various knowledge-sharing activities.
An electronic yellow pages identifies experts, and multimedia e-
mail and desktop video conferencing permit easier virtual team
meetings, report Hansen and von Oetinger.
Since the mergers, BP has reorganized its business units into
new peer groups that are more strategically focused. As Hansen
and von Oetinger note, the evolution continues.
One T-Shaped Manager’s Experiences
One BP T-shaped executive, who heads BP’s gas business unit
in Egypt, illustrates this new mode of operation. Formerly,
whenever his business unit needed help, he would call
headquarters. Now, he looks to his peers in other gas units.
His job essentially has two roles, one vertical and one
horizontal. He is CEO of the business unit, so he is responsible
for its profit-and-loss statement, capital investment decisions,
and such. He is also expected to participate in cross-unit
activities, which take up some 20 percent of his time. These
activities can undermine his vertical role, so he and the seven
gas-production peers in the Mediterranean and Atlantic regions
in his peer group limit their meetings to business purposes.
Knowledge sharing is not enough of a reason to meet. Instead,
they meet to decide how to allocate capital among themselves
and how to meet production targets set by their division’s
executive committee.
In his knowledge-sharing role, in addition to collaborating, he
also connects people, acting in some ways like a “human
portal,” suggesting who might help solve a problem, for
example. He also gives advice to peer business units when
asked and when he feels he can contribute. He was personally
involved in 3 out of 20 of his business unit’s “peer assists” one
year, report Hansen and von Oetinger. In addition, he also
requests peer assists, receiving 10 assists one year from BP
business units around the world.
Due to all BP’s networking, people know where expertise lies,
so they go directly to the expertise rather than through
headquarters. And because sharing is rewarded, bosses know

who is sharing (and requesting assistance) and who is not. In its
knowledge-sharing efforts, BP has aimed to change management
activities, not corporate structure, to gain the benefits of
knowledge sharing while preserving the autonomy of its
business units so that they can more quickly and effectively
serve their local markets. As John Browne stepped down in
2007 as the Group Chief Executive, he claimed that the success
of his tenure was the improvement of BP’s ability to learn from
mistakes and to create a knowledge-driven and sustainable
institution.
Building Structural Capital
The Rudy story also fits with this second subject, building
structural capital, because that is what Seemann and her team
aimed to do in creating the online yellow pages of knowledge
brokers. Her goal was to increase their value. Those yellow
pages are a form of structural capital. As noted earlier,
companies that emphasize building structural capital generally
use high-tech approaches.Knowledge Organization and
Categorization
This phase is often handled by creating best practices
knowledge bases or metadata indexes for documents. A few
have even tried to measure intellectual capital. Following are
two examples, one that focused on improving a knowledge-
support process and one that looked into valuing intellectual
capital.
Case Example: A Pharmaceutical Company
A project at a major pharmaceutical company was aimed at
improving the process of developing new drugs and getting
them approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), a process that takes 5 to 10 years, costs $250 million,
and can yield revenues of $1 million a day per drug once it
reaches the market.
This project, described at the Knowledge Imperative
Conference,3 revolved around creating a “knowledge
infrastructure,” one that manages information, enables

understanding, and supports learning. The crux of the matter
was to understand the customer’s needs. In this case, the FDA is
the primary customer; however, insurance companies, doctors,
and consumers are also customers. The company sells all of
them knowledge about disease, treatment, and how a drug will
work in particular scenarios. When employees understand the
type of knowledge they need to create for these customers and
their role in its creation, they will identify better ways to work.
The project began by studying and codifying 60,000 pages of
documents filed with the FDA to discern how the teams
developing drugs and filing their results were sharing
knowledge. These regulatory files explain to the FDA what the
company knows about a drug, how it learned those things, and
what conclusions it has reached.
The knowledge-infrastructure project team found the files
lacking. Each file should have four parts: purpose, content,
logic, and context. Only one of the files had a statement of
purpose, which stated the problem to be solved. A file without a
statement of purpose shows that the author does not know the
reason for the document. Many files had contradictions, which
told the team that the authors had not talked to each other. For
instance, they disagreed on whether the drug should be taken
once or twice a day.
To rectify the situation, the study team created a generic
knowledge tree of the questions the FDA asks when deciding
whether to approve a drug. The top of the tree has their three
main questions: Is it safe? Does it work? Does it have sufficient
quality? The tree lays out the supporting questions for these
three main questions, in layers, which shows the teams which
questions they need to answer to the FDA’s satisfaction. It also
shows people why others need specific information, thus giving
them a context (beyond trust) for sharing.
In a pilot project, the knowledge-infrastructure team used a
different process with one team: writing as a tool for thinking.
They got the team to write up their 10-year drug study before
they did it, so that the team members were clear about the data

they needed to gather and present to the FDA. Furthermore, they
wrote the report template publicly as a team. To create the
template, they wrote critical points that had to be in the report
on Post-It notes. Next, they prioritized the points on huge sheets
of paper on the meeting-room wall. Then they designed studies
to prove the points that had to be proven. In creating this virtual
prototype of the knowledge to be presented to the FDA,
publicly, on the wall, they could physically see what knowledge
was needed. They created a common mental model of the
results. It was a powerful technique.
They have seen tangible progress in filling in the report sections
on content, logic, context, and purpose. In another case, where
an existing drug was to be registered for use with a new disease,
the team had not made much progress in two years’ time. After
they were shown the knowledge tree over a two-day period, they
were able to submit the file to the FDA in three months (they
had previously estimated 18 months), and the FDA approved it
in 18 months (the team had estimated three years).
Skandia Future Centers,1b discussed in Chapter 4, provides an
example of delving into the world of valuing knowledge. Few
firms have ventured into this realm, but because Skandia deals
in knowledge and wants to experiment with the future, this is
one area it has explored.
Case Example: Skandia Future Centers
www.skandia.com
The charter for Skandia Future Centers is organizational
prototyping. One project, the knowledge exchange, has
addressed the question of putting a value on intangibles, such as
knowledge.
Today, some 70 percent of investments in the United States are
for intangibles; in Sweden it is 90 percent. However, no
common mechanism for establishing their value or trading that
value is yet available. A knowledge exchange increases the
accessibility of hidden knowledge and will act as a multiplier
for wealth creators, both people and organizations.
Skandia’s knowledge exchange began as a network for

exchanging knowledge using software akin to Lotus Notes. Over
time, it has evolved into a Web-based trading arena where
people can buy and sell knowledge assets. It is now based on
Nonet, a Lotus Notes–like product from Metaphor, a Spanish
company.
It has two test sites called ICuniverse.com (IC stands for
intellectual capital) andFuturizing.com. On ICuniverse.com, for
example, before responding to an e-mail message, the recipient
and the sender first agree on a price to be paid to the responder,
perhaps via an auction. Thus, people are paid for the knowledge
they provide. Ideas and writings can be housed
on ICuniverse.com and resold, which gives high yield to
currently unvalued intellectual assets.
The two sites run on an infrastructure (IQport) owned by
NatWest in the United Kingdom and were built over several
years’ time. IQport includes software and a financial clearing
mechanism so that information that is generally thrown away
can be wrapped into a package and given a price tag. The sites
are linked to two accounts at NatWest; one is in financial
currency (traditional money), the other is in digital currency,
which can be used to purchase other knowledge. Skandia is
testing this concept because it could become a new global
currency. It is part of the new digital economy.
The knowledge-exchange project has been self-organizing from
the start. The center simply provides the arena for “knowledge
entrepreneurs” or “knowledge nomads”—people who go from
arena to arena working on their latest ideas. Thus, the center
supports a nontraditional working model.
To illustrate its migration, the project began with IT people
from the United Kingdom who were then joined by IT people
from Sweden and the United States. Later, students and the
professor from Venezuela who developed Nonet for oil
companies was the mainstay. The students collaborated with the
professor at the center and with Metaphor, the Spanish company
that bought Nonet. Today, the knowledge-exchange team has
people from Sweden and Denmark.

The question that Skandia Future Centers is now asking itself
is: How can we reward knowledge nomads? They do not want a
career; they want a journey and freedom. Their lifestyle does
not fit into traditional organizational models, yet working with
them helps speed up accounting and organizational remodeling
because they act like bees, moving among research centers
pollinating companies with ideas.Knowledge Distribution and
Access
This phase emphasizes both pushing knowledge out to users
(distribution) and accommodating users who pull information to
themselves (access). The Giga cases that emphasized this phase
also used high-tech approaches. They focused on implementing
networks and networking tools to access human and structural
capital. Intranets and groupware were important IT-based tools.
To illustrate one enterprise’s approach, we turn to a U.S. energy
company discussed in the Giga report.2
Case Example: A U.S. Energy Company
In this highly autonomous energy company, the 15 business
units each focused on their own performance. To instill sharing
in this culture, these units would have to see the benefits
themselves. In addition, many of the employees were concerned
they would not get credit for their good ideas. To overcome
both issues, management decided to focus on promulgating best
practices across the business units. A best practice was defined
as a practice, know-how, or experience that had proven
effective or valuable in one organization and might be
applicable to another, notes Giga.
With management encouragement, a number of programs to
collect best practices arose. For example, groups in the refining
division documented best practices using Lotus Notes.13 They
documented “hard” practices (such as distilling techniques) and
“soft” practices (such as training) and recorded metrics, where
possible. The division estimated it saved $130 million a year
utilizing each other’s best practices, notes Giga. Similar
programs appeared in other divisions.
Yet, these efforts were disparate, so an enterprising manager

within IS gathered all the statistics together and presented them
to top management to demonstrate how the company could be
nurtured to become a learning company. With top management
support, an important booklet was created to align the various
divisions. It explained the company’s mission, vision,
values, total quality management (TQM), and environmental
policies. It became the guide for sharing best practices.
In fact, the TQM principles of focusing on processes, measuring
processes, and continuously improving them, which the
company’s employees understood and used, played an important
role in espousing knowledge distribution and reuse.
One example was in its capital projects management process.
This process is used to manage some $4 billion worth of
projects a year. In benchmarking this process, management
discovered it had some gaps. Therefore, the process was
redesigned, and management of capital projects improved.
Seeing the benefits of this process orientation, the corporate
office funded other cross-business-unit initiatives that fostered
sharing.
However, there was still no central responsibility for knowledge
distribution and reuse, and such centralization would not fit the
culture well. To solve this problem, certain people were
designated “technical knowledge experts” because they knew
about best practices across the company. Their job was to
disseminate tacit knowledge. To do that, they looked for
technical ways to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
Lotus Notes, as noted earlier, was commonly used to house best
practices. It links best practice databases across the 15
operating companies. Employees are encouraged to use Notes to
describe best practices, search for a mentor on a subject they
need to know about, and find best practices. Notes has also been
used to support processes. For example, it is used to coordinate
the around-the-clock work of 100 employees in the refining
company. In creating this workflow system, the employees
reengineered the work so coordination worked more smoothly.
The company has also created online discussion databases, some

50 of them, to encourage sharing and reduce travel. Some of the
networks have attracted hundreds of employees, leading to a
more networked culture. In turn, some of these networks have
led to face-to-face get-togethers, which have further spurred
sharing on common topics, such as how to reduce energy costs,
improve quality, and hone public relations in different cultures.
In short, this company has spurred best practice sharing
wherever it makes sense, mainly guided by the interests of the
employees. The results have not only been cost savings, but also
a change in employee perception, based on the results of
employee satisfaction surveys. Employees responded that there
was increased emphasis on processes and more sharing of best
practices across the company.
Building Customer Capital
As noted earlier, customer capital is the strength of a company’s
franchise with its customers, the percentage of customer
“mindshare” in its industry. Brand recognition is part of
customer capital. Familiarity with one’s products is another.
One of the most fascinating case studies in the Giga knowledge
management report,2 all of which are anonymous, is the one
about the vice president who derived the notion of customer
capital. Here is that story, based on that report.
Case Example: A North American Bank
After the U.S. savings and loan debacle and the devaluation of
real estate in the 1980s, the vice president of organizational
learning and leadership development at a North American bank
asked, “Why have banks become so exposed to risk in their
lending practices?” The answer he arrived at was, “Because they
do not understand the new information age and its underpinning
collateral.” At the time, and still today, banks lent money
against hard assets, such as a shopping mall. However, the value
of such assets can dissipate almost overnight, making them
risky collateral. “Perhaps there is less risk in lending against
soft assets, such as a group’s knowledge of a programming
language or a patented process,” he reasoned. Knowledge in a

person’s head does not disappear overnight. However, the vice
president had no way of valuing such intangibles. He continued
to work on the problem of knowledge valuation. Over time, his
thinking changed the way the bank evaluated new hires and
reshaped some of its operations.
To begin his quest on how to value knowledge, or intellectual
capital, he drew on the ideas of human capital and structural
capital, and then added his own: customer capital.
Human capital was the know-how to meet customer needs; he
asked bank managers to measure it by assessing how fast their
teams learned. To increase human capital, he shifted emphasis
at the bank from training (pushing instruction to people) to
learning (getting people to pull the instruction they needed to
them), because he believed the crux of increasing human capital
was increasing the pace at which an organization learns. He
believed people learned when they “owned” their learning and
took responsibility for applying it to improve their performance.
He developed a list of skills needed to serve customers and gave
employees numerous ways to learn these skills, from reading
specific books to choosing a mentor.
Structural capital was the organizational capabilities needed by
the marketplace. The vice president measured structural capital
by uncovering the percentage of bank revenue that came from
new services and similar metrics. He believed that although it
takes human capital to build structural capital, the better the
bank’s structural capital, the higher its human capital; one feeds
the other. Thus, he generated structural capital from human
capital by creating a competitive intelligence “library” about
the industry that the bank considers a valuable “intellectual
capital repository.” Rather than being a library of documents,
however, it was a map that showed the kinds of knowledge the
bank held and where it existed, whether in an employee’s head
or a database.
Customer capital was the intellectual assets in the minds of
customers related to the bank. The vice president’s team
measured three aspects: depth of knowledge about the bank in a

customer organization, breadth of knowledge by a customer, and
loyalty to the bank. To strengthen these aspects, the vice
president believed the bank needed to assist its customers’
employees in learning. Some of that learning pertained to
learning more about the bank, which required making the bank’s
values and strategies congruent with those of its customers. The
vice president therefore helped senior bank officials determine
customer needs; establish a common language for
communicating with customers; develop a sense of purpose for
the relationship; and, most importantly, make learning within
the customer organization an important part of the bank’s
services. He believes that assisting customers will increase his
bank’s customer capital: depth, breadth, and loyalty. Thus, his
knowledge management efforts focused outwardly as well as
inwardly.
To recap, Figure 14-2 shows the key activities in each of the
four stages, the form of capital each supports, the skills
required of people, and the tools and techniques that are proving
valuable for that stage.
Figure 14-2 Knowledge Management Stages
Phase
Emphasis
Skills/People
Tools/Techniques
Creation and Capture
Generate new knowledge
Make tacit knowledge explicit
Hire people with the right knowledge
Create culture of sharing
Encourage innovation
Incentives for sharing
Human capital
Customer capital
Knowledge harvesters
Knowledge owners
Mentoring/coaching

Partner with universities
Teamwork
Business intelligence
Top management
Easy-to-use capture tools
E-mail
Face-to-face meetings
Knowledge tree
Write-to-think
Feedback
Organization and Categorization
Package knowledge
Add context to information
Create categories of knowledge
Create knowledge vocabulary
Create metadata tags for documents
Measure intellectual capital
Structural capital
Academics
Knowledge editors
Librarians
Knowledge architects
Authors
Subject matter experts
IS
Frameworks
Cull knowledge from sources
Best practices databases
Knowledge bases
Knowledge thesaurus
Knowledge indexes
Measurement tools
Distribution and Access
Create links to knowledge
Create networks of people
Create electronic push and pull distribution mechanisms

Knowledge sharing
Structural capital
Publishers
Top management
IS
HTML
Groupware, Lotus Notes
Networks, intranets
Navigation aids
Search tools
Absorption and Reuse
Stimulate interaction among people
The learning organization
Informal networks
Human capital
Group facilitators
Organizational developers
Matchmakers
Knowledge brokers
Team processes
Electronic bulletin boards
Communities of practice
Yellow pages
Source: Reprinted with permission from Best Practices in
Knowledge Management, Giga Information Group,
1997, www.gigaweb.com.
The Cultural Side of Knowledge Management
Success in managing knowledge comes as much from changing
organizational behavior as it does from implementing new
technology, notes Cyril Brooks.5 His company, Grapevine,
offers a product for managing information and knowledge. He
notes that besides the platitude of “create a culture that rewards
sharing,” few people recommend specifics on how to reduce the
cultural roadblocks that can hinder knowledge management
projects. He describes some cultural barriers, which he calls

“red flags.”Watch Out for Cultural Red Flags
Cultural barriers can shut down knowledge management efforts
because knowledge management is really about cooperation and
sharing. To reach these lofty goals, efforts need to turn the tacit
knowledge in people’s heads into explicit knowledge in a
process, product, or other organizational artifact. Thus,
knowledge management work must tap people’s motivations to
share and cooperate. Without the motivation, knowledge
databases, for example, are not updated or errors are ignored.
Or people avoid contributing to a knowledge-sharing network
for fear they will give away their best ideas and lose their
“competitive advantage” against their peers in the company.
Such red flags are not obvious; they are often subtle, yet
harmful, says Brooks.
Here are a few of his behavioral red flags that can derail a
knowledge management effort:
· Being seen as a whistle-blower or messenger of bad news. Few
people want to betray their boss, so they avoid presenting early
warnings or disagreeing with internal documents. In
organizations where “messengers get shot,” sharing good news
is fine, but sharing bad news is not, which defeats the full value
of sharing.
· Losing one’s place as a knowledge gatekeeper. Although
knowledge brokers are important in organizations, their self-
value comes from their controlling the knowledge they house
and sharing it only with whom and when they choose. They may
see a knowledge management system that encourages the free
flow of ideas as decreasing their value, and therefore fight it.
· Knowledge sharing really does take time. Because sharing
takes time, experts may hide so that they are not bothered by
requests from others. Others may not participate in, say,
presenting their ideas, which may benefit the organization as a
whole but has no personal reward, so they think.
These reactions are human; therefore, knowledge management
efforts often need to build “cultural workarounds” so that these
kinds of reactions do not block the work. Brooks offers some

suggestions. For example, to reduce concerns about being a
messenger, the system might allow only limited dissemination
of some ideas or give people the ability to rank feedback
comments based on their significance. To counter concerns
about losing personal advantage, contributions could require
authorship or comments might always be linked to the original
items. To reduce time consumption, the reward structure could
reward contributions based on their value.
In addition to cultural red flags, management red flags are also
a concern. Three management red flags are:
1. Saying the project is not cost-justifiable because the benefits
are intangible
2. Concern that too much participation will reduce employee
productivity
3. Concern that creating the taxonomy of knowledge categories
will be just too expensive to undertake
Reducing these concerns is an important aspect of knowledge
management. Some examples for mitigating these management
roadblocks, says Brooks, include illustrating the value of
serendipity that has occurred due to sharing, as illustrated in
vendor case studies; ensuring that the new system promotes
feedback to contributors, which can increase productivity; and
drawing on vendor expertise to create knowledge taxonomies
rather than start from scratch.
As Brooks points out, organizational culture is an important
aspect of knowledge management efforts and a key determinant
of success.Design the System to Match What the Users Value
Thomas Stewart,6 a well-known writer in the knowledge
management field, agrees and makes the important point that
knowledge needs to be managed within the context where value
is created. In short, the system needs to be designed to fit the
people who will use it and gain value from it. He notes that
many official knowledge management efforts have come to
naught because they did not create the place where people first
look for knowledge. On the other hand, a number of grassroots,
unofficial efforts have succeeded.

Stewart gives the example of three consultants who created an
informal, unofficial Notes-based e-mail list in their company to
have a place to collaborate online. Anyone could join the list; to
date, it has attracted over 500 company employees. It has
actually become the premier knowledge-sharing mechanism in
the company even though it is difficult to search and generates a
lot of messages, which fill up e-mail boxes. It works for four
reasons:
1. It is demand driven. Some 80 percent of the traffic is
members asking each other, “Does anyone know anything about.
. . . ?”
2. It roots out tacit knowledge. People contribute what they
know, which might not be recorded anywhere in the company.
3. It is right in front of the members in their e-mail boxes every
day.
4. It is full of intriguing and strongly held opinions, which the
members find most interesting.
The system is like a conversation rather than a library; thus, it
is about learning rather than teaching. That is a major
difference. It was designed to manage knowledge in the context
where value is created. Given the high number of failed
knowledge management projects, Stewart suggests answering
the following three questions before launching off:
1. Which group will use this knowledge space? Once
determined, make them responsible for the content.
2. What kind of knowledge does the group need? Once known,
that knowledge needs to be managed within that group’s context
because that is where the value arises. A knowledge
management system or resource should only deal with a single
group that creates value in the same way.
3. What is the company culture; is it composed of reusers or
originators? The difference matters. A repository of things
promotes a reuse culture; an online chat room helps originators,
but not vice versa.
Beware of creating a system that supports the wrong culture.
There is really no such thing as a generic knowledge

management system. Each one needs to fit a knowledge-sharing
group. Answering these questions will help uncover the
structure and content of a knowledge management resource that
will add value and actually be used.
As an example of a knowledge management project that has
worked and has followed many of the tenets espoused by
Stewart, consider the work at Partners HealthCare System in
Boston. Notice how it takes into account the health care culture.
Case Example: Partners Healthcare System
www.partners.org
Not too long ago, Tom Davenport of Accenture’s Institute for
Strategic Change and John Glaser, CIO of Partners HealthCare
System in Boston,7 described how Partners HealthCare System
is delivering just-in-time knowledge.
The problem the physicians at Partners HealthCare hospitals and
physician groups face is the deluge of new knowledge they need
to know but cannot possibly keep up with on their own. The
solution has been to present physicians with the new knowledge
they need when they need it through the information technology
they already use in their work. In essence, this approach makes
knowledge management part of their job, not a separate activity,
and it can deliver knowledge just when a patient really needs it.
The work at Partners HealthCare began on a small, doable scale:
using the doctors’ online order entry system to notify doctors of
drug interactions when they enter a prescription order. The
system checks the patient’s medical record, looks for allergic
reactions to the drug (or a similar drug), and alerts the
physician. The doctor can inquire about the reaction, and, if it
was mild, override the computer’s recommendation to switch to
another medication.
The system can also tell the doctor about a newer, more
effective drug or inform him or her of another drug the patient
is taking that can lead to a bad interaction. Or, if the doctor is
ordering a test, the system can describe a newer, more effective
test for the noted symptom. Or the system can warn the doctor
that the prescribed medication could worsen a patient’s disease.

This integrated system is built on knowledge bases (databases
of knowledge about the patient, drugs, tests, medical research,
and such) and a logic engine (which, as its name implies,
performs the logical interconnections between the various kinds
of knowledge in the knowledge bases).
The system also has an event-detection mechanism, which alerts
a physician when it learns of an event that can endanger the
health of a patient. For example, when the patient’s health
indicators deviate from the norm while the patient is in the
hospital, the doctor or a nurse is notified via pager. This
capability brings knowledge management into real time, note
Davenport and Glaser.
However, this system could not be bought. It had to be built by
Partners HealthCare. It was a large investment, but it was made
because too many patients at Partners were experiencing drug
interactions. Management had to fix that problem. One of the
steps it took was to form committees of top clinicians to
identify the knowledge that needed to be in the knowledge bases
and keep it up to date. The drug therapy committee makes the
medication recommendations, whereas the radiology committee
develops the logic to guide radiology testing. Participation in
each committee is seen as prestigious, which is crucial to the
success of the system, so that busy physicians give time to the
committee work.
Another step Partners took was to only address the most critical
processes. Furthermore, the system is simply seen as a
recommendation system. It does not make final decisions. Those
are left up to the physicians. The combined human–computer
system seems to be working. Some 380 orders (out of 13,000 a
day) are changed due to a computer suggestion.
Some one-third to one-half of orders with drug interactions are
cancelled, and some 72 percent of treatments are changed when
the event-detection system sounds an alert. Partner’s strong
measurement culture helps it gather such statistics and see the
benefits of the system.
In summary, embedding knowledge in the systems and work

processes that professionals use is an effective way to achieve
just-in-time knowledge management and dramatically improve
an organization’s performance.Intellectual Capital Issues
Data, information, content, and intellectual capital all raise
some thorny issues. These issues have prompted legislation in
some countries, but not all, which causes even more problems in
today’s intertwined, global society. Their resolution is
important for global e-commerce, and such resolution could be a
long way off. We begin by looking at information value, usage,
and sharing issues. Then we move on to the large, but rarely
discussed, subject of computer ethics.
If information is to be viewed as an asset, as many companies
now do, it must be treated differently from the traditional assets
of labor and capital, notes Thomas Davenport.8 For one thing,
information is not divisible. Nor is it scarce. In addition,
ownership cannot be clearly defined. We discuss here four
categories of issues in managing information:
1. Value issues
2. Usage issues
3. Sharing issues
4. Social and ecological issues
Value Issues
Information’s value depends on the recipient and the context. In
fact, most people cannot put a value on a piece of information
until they have seen it. However, people do, indeed, place
values on information. Look at all the information services that
people buy. Information marketplaces exist, both inside and
outside of companies. The only practical way to establish the
value of information is to establish a price for it and see
whether anyone buys it. Pricing possibilities include charging
for the information itself rather than for the technology or the
provider, charging by the document rather than a smaller unit,
charging by length or time or number of users, or charging by
value rather than cost.
A number of tools are being used within companies to increase

the value of information.
· Information maps.These maps can be text-based charts or even
diagrammatic maps that point to the location of information,
whether in written material, experts’ minds, and so forth. IBM,
for example, created a guide to market information so that
managers can find out where to get quick answers to their ad
hoc questions. The result has been less money spent on
duplicate information and increased understanding of the kinds
of questions people typically ask.
· Information guides.Guides are people who know where desired
information can be found. Librarians have traditionally played
this role. Hallmark Cards, for instance, created a job guide in its
business units to help employees find computer-based
information on available jobs. These guides have substantially
reduced the time needed to find information.
· Business documents.Business documents are yet another tool
for sharing information. They provide organization and context.
One fruitful way to embark on information management is to
uncover what documents an organization needs. This process
can be easier, and more useful, than defining common terms.
One brokerage firm discovered that its brokers all used the same
documents, over and over. Some 90 percent of these documents
could be put on one CD-ROM, kept on local servers, and
updated monthly, greatly facilitating information use.
· Groupware.Groupware is a tool for getting greater value out of
less structured information. It allows people to share
information across distances in a more structured manner than
e-mail. Lotus Notes is such a product. Groupware can ease
discussions and aid distribution of information, but its success
depends upon the culture. For one, better access to information
increases (not decreases) people’s appetite for even more
information. However, employees using sophisticated
groupware products need to learn how the technology can be
used to improve work habits and profits, neither of which flows
naturally from the technology.
To create value, the databases need to be managed, even pruned

and restructured. Knowledgeable people are needed to manage
the information resource and its use. This need is true for
intranets and Web sites as well.
Usage Issues
Information management is a management issue because it deals
with how people use information, not how they use machines,
says Davenport. Three points illustrate the importance and
difficulty of managing information use.
One, information’s complexity needs to be preserved.
Information should not be simplified to be made to fit into a
computer, because doing so truncates sharing and conversations.
Information does not conform to common definitions. It is
messy. It naturally has different perspectives, which are
important and need to be preserved. A certain amount of tension
between the desire for one common global meaning and
numerous familiar local meanings is inevitable. Companies that
want to settle on common corporate terms must do so with line
people, not technical people, because line people will use the
end results. The IS organization can facilitate these discussions,
but the businesspeople should determine the meanings.
Two, people do not easily share information, even though its
value grows as it is shared. Culture often blocks sharing,
especially in highly competitive organizational cultures.
Three, technology does not change culture. Just building an
information system does not mean that people will use it. It is a
false assumption that too many IS people make. To change the
information culture of a company requires changing basic
behaviors, values, attitudes, and management expectations.
Sharing Issues
If information sharing is the goal, a number of contentious
challenges must first be resolved. Davenport explains that a
sharing culture must be in place or the existing disincentives
will thwart use of a sharing system.
Technical solutions do not address the sharing issue. For

example, much talk has touted information architectures, where
the definitions of stable types of corporate data, such as
customers, products, and business transactions, can be specified
ahead of time and used consistently across the firm. This
approach may work for data, but it is problematic for
information, because information architectures generally fail to
take into account how people use the information. Managers get
two-thirds of their information from conversations, one-third
from documents, and almost none directly from computer
systems. Therefore, a common computer-based information
architecture is not likely to solve the information-management
problem.
An issue in sharing is: Who determines who has legitimate need
for the information? The “owning” department? Top
management? And who identifies the owner? The process of
developing the principles for managing information—how it is
defined and distributed—is actually more important than the
resulting principles because the touchy subject of information
sharing is brought out into the open during the process. In short,
working out information issues requires addressing entrenched
attitudes about organizational control. That is where consensus
needs to be built: in discussions, not through edicts.
Is sharing good? asks Davenport. Not in all cases. Forcing
employees to share information with those above them can lead
to intrusive management. Some executive support systems limit
“drill down” for just this reason. Managers must think about
these types of issues in information management.
Unlimited information sharing does not work. Limits are
necessary. On the one hand, the sharing of corporate
performance figures is beneficial, especially when corporate
performance is poor, because it usually increases morale;
uninformed employees usually guess the worst. On the other
hand, the sharing of rumors (noninformation) generally
demoralizes people. Separating information from
noninformation is an information-management issue. Allowing
employees to send messages to large distribution lists

exacerbates the information-management problem.
Managements have awakened to the fact that they need to
address this issue. Vendors have developed filters and agents
for e-mail systems. Such responses can help resolve corporate
information-management issues, but only when the correct
underlying policies are put in place.
Even hiring practices play a role in information management. If
promotions are based on circulation and publication of new
ideas, a sharing environment exists. If these activities are not
rewarded, sharing may be anathema to the culture.
In all, getting value out of information requires more than
technology. Information is inherently hard to control. It is ever
expanding and unpredictable. Only when executives view
information in this light will they manage it for most effective
use.
Social and Ecological Issues
It is worth repeating here that the leading theme of this chapter
is how to use knowledge management to sustain individual and
business performance. This is achieved through technology-
supported learning, unlearning, and adaptation. Despite the
advances of more intelligent systems, and the willingness of
large corporations to invest billions of dollars in these
technologies, it is also important to recognize the limitations of
technologies. Data mining and other data-driven analytics have
shown useful results, but they could also lead to inconsequential
or dumb results. Human users of knowledge management
technologies should remain as the key part of knowledge quality
assurance, or at least, as educated knowledge consumers.
Today’s “intelligent” systems are certainly smarter than their
predecessors. But it would be a stretch to argue that IT can store
and distribute human intelligence and experience. The ability to
deliver the right information to the right person at the right time
in a dynamic, context-dependent concept still requires human
intelligence.
An organization can be viewed as a knowledge ecology with

evolving interactions between knowledge workers capable of
learning and adapting to changing situations. Therefore,
nurturing and protecting intellectual capital continue to be
central concerns for knowledge-based organizations.
The social and ecological issue here is at least twofold. First, as
knowledge, defined in its broadest sense, is widely fragmented
across networks of servers, the power that can be derived from
this knowledge is shifted to a large number of independent
stakeholders. It is difficult to predict how these people work
together or against each other in the creation and use of
intellectual capital. Furthermore, with the ease of access to
massively distributed knowledge, how do organizations bond
human talents together to create and sustain a shared vision or
common sense of purpose?WiKis
A Simple Open Source for Online Knowledge Repository
In 1994, Howard G. Cunningham started the development of a
piece of software known as the WikiWikiWeb or simply
WikiWiki, or simply Wiki for the Portland Pattern Repository.
The idea was to build an electronic forum allowing computer
programmers to exchange ideas about software development.
The technology was based on Apple’s hypercard concept
developed in the 1980s to cross-link texts and documents. One
of Cunningham’s concerns was to design a platform that users
can quickly log in and edit the text. Wiki in Hawaiian language
means “fast.” This very first Wiki now hosts tens of thousands
of pages. When knowledge is not intended to be shared, a
desktop-based Personal Wiki can be used to organize content.
The Wiki engine is a simple collaborative software installed on
a Web server or more that allows Web pages to be created and
edited using a Web browser. As information is entered in the
text by users (affectionately called wikizens), the system stores
information in a database-management system, or a content
management system. To date, there exists a rather extensive list
of Wikis systems using net-centric and open source technologies
with Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, VPScript, Python, and others.

The concept was quickly adopted by many communities, and
turned the Wiki concept into a platform for online communities
to build collective knowledge. Wikis are growing in number.
They serve as knowledge repositories, with the Wikipedia as
one of the success stories of collective and global knowledge
creation. Today, many large organizations are creating their
own context-specific Wikis for internal knowledge management.
The knowledge creation is based on trust and a strong code of
ethics to give all participants the motivation to engage the
building of the Wikis, with no malicious intent. Users can freely
add or delete content, but here are roll-back procedures to revert
to previous versions which are available Wikis as histories. In
many Wikis, contributors are requested to register so that Wikis
administrator can hold trace contact them or hold them
accountable.
From a knowledge-management perspective, the creation of
Wiki pages by the community of practice illustrates well the
concept of conversational knowledge management. In
distributed or virtual environments, individuals use a common
Internet platform to create knowledge. Unlike other forms of
information exchange or conversational knowledge such as e-
mail, instant messaging, discussion forums, or decision support
technologies, Wikis has the potential for organization to
facilitate group work—such as writing an annual report or a
business plan—without the need for meeting face-to-face. Wikis
allow some off-line conversation. However, they excel in
collaboration.
Wikis for Business Use
Wiki technology has evolved to meet business needs.
Commercial Wiki software has features that require different
levels of authorization for people to access, add, or modify
existing contents. For example, the HR department posts some
policies on a corporate Wiki and does not allow anyone to alter
the document. New Wikis also have better versioning features,
allowing the users to organize information.

Generally speaking, thanks to the low cost of acquisition and
use, a Wiki would be a good technology for a business that
needs to establish an intranet quickly with a reasonable level of
functionality, security, and durability. Another reason for
installing a Wiki is to allow corporate documents to be stored
and accessible through the Internet, and let employees self-
manage these documents with a minimum of effort, while
avoiding redundancy. Many businesses have successfully used
Wikis for project management and to manage and organize
meeting agenda and minutes.
Like any business application, a business-oriented Wiki requires
adequate computing resources and proper project management.
The system that hosts a Wiki should have security and data-
management tools. The organization should also appoint a staff
member to be responsible for maintaining the Wiki.
As we discuss the issue of computer ethics in the next session,
it is fitting to address a possible downside of knowledge
creation using Wikis. As documented in the literature about
group pathologies, the information, views, and opinions stored
in the Wikis might de facto—for the better or worse—the
collective wisdom. In many instances, and by its very nature, a
Wiki’s knowledge repository is built in an anarchic manner. The
issue here is that this wisdom might be incomplete and biased,
and Wiki users should be aware of how knowledge is being
created, and the context of how knowledge is being built and
rebuilt. The Economist, in its April 20069 issue, raised the
possibility of vandalism in Wikis. Despite the code of ethics
mentioned earlier and the effort of Wikis’ administrators to
enforce some quality control, there is a risk of people telling
lies. TheEconomist reports the incident of a person telling lies
on wikipedia.org. For 132 days, the lies went unnoticed and
remained on the site, until some volunteers did detective work
to trace the creator of vandalism.
Nevertheless, Wiki technologies have proved to be a flexible
tool for collaboration. The issue here for CIO or top
management leadership is to view Wiki technology as another

enabler for knowledge acquisition and dissemination.The Vast
Arena of Computer Ethics
To conclude this book, before looking to the future in the last
chapter, we need to address an issue that is coming more to the
fore: computer ethics. We can only touch on this vast subject,
but this brief discussion will give a flavor of the issues
involved. New technologies pose ethical issues when they open
up new possibilities for human action—individual action as well
as collective action—points out Deborah Johnson10 of Georgia
Institute of Technology, in her book Computer Ethics. Nuclear
power, the atom bomb, genetic engineering, and other
technologies raise ethical questions, as do computers; hence, the
realm of computer ethics.
A Little History
In the first era of computing, when companies and governments
used mainframes to collect personal information and store it in
huge databases, the perceived threat was invasion of personal
privacy. In the United States, that concern led to a major
privacy study in 1976. At the time, no formal rules limited
access to personal data in computers.
The second era of computing, mini- and micro-computers,
turned attention to the democratizing aspects of computers and
software and the ethical issues of property rights. Should
software be owned? What sorts of intellectual property laws
were needed to protect software owners? Such questions raised
the ire of people who did not like the idea of property rights in
software, those who believed software should be free. Issues of
property rights also raised liability issues: Who is responsible
for errors in code?
The third and latest era, the Internet, has brought “an endless
set of ethical issues,” notes Johnson, because it can be used in
so many aspects of life. Thus, all the concerns of the past have
resurfaced: privacy, the democratizing nature of the Internet,
property rights on Web sites, the concept of free speech (is
information on the Internet a form of speech or expression?),

and now even global property rights.
What Is Computer Ethics?
In 1985, James Moor wrote the seminal piece “What Is
Computer Ethics?”11 Moor stated that new technologies raise
ethical issues because they create policy vacuums. The ethical
issues are these vacuums. The role of computer ethics is to fill
the vacuums. Thus, areas of ethical concern include privacy,
property rights, liabilities, free speech, and professional ethics.
This notion implies that the technology appears first and the
ethics follow. It might be better for IT to follow ethics, says
Johnson, but that rarely happens in any technology. Two
possible examples are freeware and the privacy-enhancing
technology of anonymous remailers.
New technologies bring benefits and problems, which raise the
ethical issues of how to shape a technology’s use for good and
minimize its use for harm. We need to make moral choices
about how we are going to use IT, personally, organizationally,
nationally, and even globally. The central task of computer
ethics is to determine what our personal and social policies
should be, states Moor.
Johnson provides a whole host of examples of IT ethical issues.
Here are abbreviated samplings of a few of her examples to
show the breadth of this subject.
· John buys a software package to help him invest in penny
stocks. At a party, he mentions the software to Mary and she
asks to borrow it. She likes it, so she copies it and then returns
the original software to John. What did Mary do wrong, if
anything? Why is it wrong? (Intellectual property rights)
· Inga has a small business and collects customer data from her
customers directly and from their purchases. She wants to use
data-mining tools on these data to uncover patterns and
correlations among her customers. The customers gave her the
data to make a purchase; she wants to use those data for another
purpose, even though individuals will not be uniquely identified
in this use. Would she be doing anything wrong? (Privacy)

· Carl is a systems designer who is designing a system to
monitor radar signals and launch missiles in response to those
signals. He has become concerned that the system has not been
made secure, for one thing, and that it cannot adequately
distinguish between a missile and a small airplane, for another.
His manager dismisses his concerns. What should he do?
(Professional ethics)
· Grundner sent a message on an unmoderated listserv that
contained the phrase “wives . . . and other informationally
challenged individuals.” Mabel sent him a private message
reprimanding him for his sexist language. Grundner thought
Mabel’s message was sent to the entire listserv, so he broadcast
a message that stated that online communications transcend
barriers as long as “professional victim-mongers” do not “screw
it up.” Many members of the listserv felt Grundner’s response
was a personal attack on Mabel, and said so. Others sent
messages on gender issues. Insults spread around the listserv.
What’s wrong with this? (Flaming)
· Kimiko is a successful pension fund manager who uses an
expert system to help her make investment decisions. Her
experience tells her the market is going to turn down, so she
wants to sell stock. However, the expert system recommends
buying stock, even when Kimiko double-checks the economic
indicator data she has entered. She does not understand the
reasoning in the expert system, so she cannot check its logic.
For all she knows, it could be malfunctioning. What should she
do, buy or sell? (Accountability)
· Milo is an independent journalist and an expert on South
American politics. He subscribes to an Internet-based service
that sends him articles and news on areas of interest to him.
Upon returning from a trip, he discovers a posting that says he
is involved in illegal drug dealing and his articles protect drug
cohorts. Milo is enraged by the lie. He wants to sue for
defamation of character, but the bulletin board owner will not
give him the address of the message poster, who used a
pseudonym. So he sues the bulletin board owner instead. Are

bulletin board owners liable for the contents posted on their
board? (Accountability)
To address such issues, says Johnson, some people look to
traditional moral norms and apply them to the new situations.
They extend property law (copyrights, patent, and trade secret
laws) to software. Similarly, certain kinds of spoken and written
communications have traditionally been considered impolite or
confidential. The same should hold for computer-mediated
communications, some contend.
However, to apply past norms, we must first define, say, the
Internet or software, which is difficult to do when both are still
evolving. Is the Internet a highway? A shopping mall? A fantasy
world? Each would have different laws, contends Johnson,
which is one reason why computer ethics is so difficult. She
questions whether we should be treating new opportunities like
old situations. Although it is true that new uses of, say,
computers, touch familiar ethical notions, we need to ask
whether they pose new ethical issues. That is the main purview
of computer ethics. IT creates a new species of traditional moral
issues, with new variations and new twists, says Johnson.
So the question becomes, should we fill the vacuums with laws
or something else? The answer should not begin or end with
laws. Rather, we need a shared sense of what is good and just.
We need personal and institutional policies and social mores.
The ethical questions surround what people do to one another.
Therefore, they involve such concepts as harm, responsibility,
privacy, and property. In essence, says Johnson, IT creates a
new instrumentation for human action, making new actions
possible. As such, it can change the character of actions. For
example, launching a computer virus on the Internet can wreak
havoc for thousands, even tens of thousands of people and
institutions. We need to account for this change in ethics, she
contends.
Some actions are unethical only because they are illegal. Others
are unethical whether or not they are legal. Much of the
unethical behavior on the Internet is not controversial or

complicated. It is just criminal behavior in a new medium. It is
doing bad things in new ways. Computer ethics can thus be
thought of as a new species of general moral issues that may not
fit familiar categories. It has a global scope, which makes it
unusual, and the actions have reproducibility in that they can be
easily shared.
With this brief introduction to the realm of computer ethics, we
now look at four areas that raise ethical and legal questions.
1. Information privacy
2. Intellectual property rights
3. Legal jurisdiction
4. Online contracting
Information Privacy
Privacy includes freedom from intrusion, the right to be left
alone, the right to control information about oneself, and
freedom from surveillance. It is a major issue in today’s world
because of the widespread availability of personal data and the
ease of tracking a person’s activities on the Internet.
The United States and many other countries have enacted laws
to control certain types of personal information, such as
medical, credit, and other financial information. These laws
carry over to the online business environment. As companies
have built large databases on their online customers, the value
of these data makes selling them an attractive business option.
That is one reason the United States now has a privacy law that
requires companies to publish a description of how they treat
the personally identifiable information they handle.
Internet technologies, cookies in particular, make tracking the
browsing activities of individuals possible. Consumer concerns
about this perceived invasion of privacy now require companies
in some countries to post and adhere to privacy statements on
their Web sites.
Some companies use third-party cookies (i.e., cookies set by a
firm other than the owner of the site being visited) to do online
profiling. It is also known as profile-based advertising, and it is

a technique that marketers use to collect information about the
online behavior of Internet users and to facilitate targeted
advertising. Profile-based advertising could easily be
considered a form of online surveillance. What is worse, some
third-party cookies are often placed on Web browsers’
computers without their knowledge when banner advertisements
appear. It is not necessary to click on the banner ad to generate
a cookie.
Companies with cookies on their Web sites obviously want
information about their customers to make better decisions
about the types of products and services they should develop,
says Johnson. On the other side of the coin is people’s desire
for privacy; their fear of who has information about them; and
their mistrust of large, faceless organizations and governments.
Another technology that has privacy advocates concerned is
RFID. They contend that these radio-frequency sensors on
products will allow industry, governments, and thieves to
monitor personal belongings after they have been purchased. As
CNET’s News.com reports, Debra Bowen, a California state
senator, held a hearing on RFID technology and privacy to
study what sorts of regulation might be needed to protect
consumer privacy.12 One example of privacy invasion
mentioned at the hearing was, “How would you like it if you
discovered that your clothes were reporting on your
whereabouts?” Others presented other potential invasions of
privacy from RFID tags on individual consumer items.
Still others suggested protection possibilities. One was to create
a set of “fair use” guidelines for industry. One guideline might
be that companies must label products that have RFID tags.
Another might be to let consumers disable the sensors. A third
could be to allow consumers to request and see the information
collected about them from the sensors. Another suggestion was
to require legal guidelines to be in place before deploying
RFID.
Bowen has already introduced bills to regulate the use of other
technologies that might invade privacy, including face

recognition, data collected by cable and television companies on
consumers’ viewing habits, and shopper loyalty cards issued by
supermarkets and other chains. Bowen is not alone in her
concerns. Britain also is delving into RFID privacy issues.
However, the argument for personal information privacy has not
“won the day,” says Johnson. The following has not proven to
be a strong argument: “We control relationships by controlling
the information we give to another party. When we lose control
of our information, we lose control over how others perceive
and treat us. The loss reduces our ability to establish and
influence relationships.” The reason that this argument is not
strong is because when people must make a choice between a
social good (such as police protection) and loss of control of
information, they give up control.
A much stronger argument for the right to privacy can be made
if privacy is seen as a social good, rather than as an individual
good. This argument goes as follows, notes Johnson:
“Democracy is the freedom to exercise one’s autonomy. If the
consequences are too negative, few people will take the risk,
and democracy will diminish. For example, people act
differently when they know they are being watched. Thus,
privacy is a social good in its own right. The less privacy, the
more difficult it is to make social change. How information is
gathered, exchanged, and used affects us all, not just those who
have something to hide.”
Johnson recommends five ways to increase information privacy
protection:
1. At the national level.Treat privacy as a social good that lies
at the heart of democracy, giving its protection more weight.
Deal with privacy policy nationwide rather than on an industry-
by-industry basis, as it has been in the past. Citizens need
protection from private institutions just as much as public ones,
so include both public and private information gathering, with
an eye toward global exchange. Treat personal information as
part of the infrastructure of our society. It is better to manage
this information outside the marketplace.

2. Computer professionals.Point out privacy matters to clients
when they build databases that contain personal information.
3. Technology.Use privacy protection technologies, such as
Web anonymity and tools for detecting the privacy level of a
Web site.
4. Institutions.Adopt internal policies that protect privacy, such
as restricting who can see personal information.
5. Individuals.Take personal actions to increase the privacy of
information about you.
Intellectual Property Rights
The protection of intellectual property is critical in an Internet-
based world because many products and services contain
intellectual property, copies of such items are easy to make, and
the copy is as good as the original. Examples of online
activities in which intellectual property rights are critical
include electronic publishing, software distribution, virtual art
galleries, music distribution over the Internet, and online
education.
Following are four types of legal protection of intellectual
property: copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade
secrets.Copyrights
Copyright law aims to protect an author’s or artist’s expression
once it is in a tangible form. The work must be expressive
rather than functional; a copyright protects the expression, not
the idea. For example, a cartoon duck is an idea and cannot be
copyrighted, but Donald Duck and Daffy Duck are expressions
of that idea and are copyrighted. Registering a copyright is not
a requirement; putting the expression into tangible form is
sufficient. A copyright is valid for the life of the author plus 75
years.
Just about all original content on a Web site can be copyrighted
by the creator of the site, from buttons to video, from text to a
site layout. If a company hires someone to develop a site, by
default the copyright belongs to the developer, not the company.
The developer can then demand royalties from the company if it

uses the Web site; therefore, it behooves companies to clearly
define the ownership of the copyright in the contract.
The Internet raises many nontrivial issues for copyright law,
which was developed for physical media. Placing copyrighted
material, such as a photograph, on a Web site without
permission of the copyright holder is a clear violation of the
law. Less obvious is whether having a link to someone else’s
copyrighted material, say, a photograph, is a violation of
copyright law. In this case, the answer is probably yes.
However, if one includes a link to the homepage of the site
rather than a direct link to the content, then probably no
violation has occurred. Internet copyright issues are now being
worked out in courts and legislatures.Patents
Patent law aims to protect inventions—things or processes for
producing things, where “things” are anything under the sun
made by man but not abstract ideas or natural laws, according to
U.S. copyright law. Valid for 20 years, patent protection is
quite strong. In the United States, patents are granted by the
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after stringent thresholds on
inventiveness have been met.
The United States recognizes patents for business processes.
Although software, in general, cannot be patented—it must be
copyrighted—certain business practices implemented in
software can be patented. In the e-business
area, Amazon.com has received a patent for “one-click
purchasing.” The company has enforced its patent rights against
its main competitor, Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble
cannot use one-click purchasing on its Web site. British
Telecom has claimed to have invented the hyperlink. To obtain
the patent, the company will have to show that no prior use of
hyperlinks occurred before its use. Any prior use would
invalidate the patent.Trademarks
Trademarks protect names, symbols, and other icons used to
identify a company or product. Trademarks can be registered
with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. A trademark is valid
indefinitely, as long as it is used and does not become a generic

name for the goods or services. The aim of trademark law is to
prevent confusion among consumers in a market with similar
identifying names or symbols. The standard for trademark
infringement is whether the marks are confusingly similar.
The biggest area of trademark conflicts in e-business has to do
with domain name registration. For a while, cybersquatters were
registering domain names that clearly referred to known
companies, realizing those companies would eventually want
the domain name and would be willing to pay for it. Although
this tactic worked for a while, anti-cybersquatting laws were
passed and the practice is now illegal. To avoid potential
problems, firms should obtain and register a trademark for its
domain name. Note that most online services that register
domain names do not check for trademark infringements. Firms
are advised to do a search for possible trademark infringements
before using a domain name, to avoid future litigation.Trade
Secrets
Trade secrets, as the name implies, protect company secrets,
which can cover a wide range of processes, formulas, and
techniques. A trade secret is not registered and is valid
indefinitely, as long as it remains a secret. Although laws
protect against the theft of trade secrets, it is not illegal to
discover a trade secret through reverse engineering. Trade
secrets are the area of intellectual property rights least
applicable to e-business.
Legal Jurisdiction
Laws are written for particular jurisdictions with clear
geographic boundaries, so how do those laws apply in
cyberspace, which has no geographic boundaries? Take, for
example, the case of trademark rights, which are limited to
geographic areas. In the physical world, a sign over “Lee’s
Computer Services” in Singapore would not have a significant
impact on “Lee’s Computer Services” in Honolulu—neither in
customers nor competition. However, in cyberspace the Web
sites of the two companies would clearly overlap and, if the

companies were to take advantage of the global reach of the
Internet, competitive overlap could be an issue. The companies
have little legal recourse for resolving their identical
trademarks.
Gambling provides another example. Do Hawaiian laws against
gambling apply to a Nevada company with a gambling site on
its Web server located in Las Vegas? The Attorney General of
Minnesota has asserted the right to regulate gambling that
occurs on a foreign Web page that is accessed and “brought
into” his state by a local resident.
Similar cases have involved sites dealing with pornography and
securities trading. Alabama successfully prosecuted a California
couple for bringing pornography into Alabama; their server was
in California. Note that U.S. pornography laws are based on
“community standards”; Los Angeles, California, standards are
clearly different from those of Mobile, Alabama. The state of
New Jersey is attempting to regulate securities trading over the
Internet if anyone in the state has access to it, and many states
are trying to revise their tax codes to gain revenues from e-
commerce.
At best, this trend is disturbing. At worst, it could greatly
disrupt e-business. Faced with the inability to control the flow
of electrons across physical boundaries, some authorities strive
to impose their boundaries on cyberspace. When technological
mechanisms, such as filters, fail, the authorities assert the right
to regulate online trade if their local citizens may be affected.
In essence, under this approach, all Internet-based commerce
would be subject simultaneously to the laws of all territorial
governments. Imagine a Hawaiian company setting up a Web
site for retailing over the Internet needing to consider the laws
of Hawaii, California, New York, and the other 47 states, plus
Singapore, Peru, Syria, and any other place you might name.
This situation would clearly cripple e-business.
The concepts of “distinct physical location” and “place where
an activity occurred” fall apart in cyberspace; no clear answer is
available to the question: Where did this event take place? Of

relevance are the locations of the business’s offices,
warehouses, and servers containing the Web sites. Some of the
uncertainty can be resolved by placing online contracts on the
site specifying the legal jurisdiction that will be used for
disputes. Users who agree to the contract designate so by
clicking a button that says “I agree.” In most cases, the contract
will hold.
In the United States, states have adopted the Uniform
Commercial Code (UCC), a wide-ranging codification of
significant areas of U.S. commercial laws. The National
Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Law and the
American Law Institute, who sponsor the UCC, are working to
adapt the UCC to cyberspace.
Internationally, the United Nations Commission on International
Trade Law has developed a model law that supports the
commercial use of international contracts in e-commerce. This
model law establishes rules and norms that validate and
recognize contracts formed through electronic means, sets
standards governing electronic contract performance, defines
what constitutes a valid electronic writing and original
document, provides for the acceptability of electronic signatures
for legal and commercial purposes, and supports the admission
of computer evidence in courts and arbitration proceedings.
Online Contracting
A contract is a voluntary exchange between two parties.
Contract law looks for evidence that the parties have mutually
assented to the terms of a particular set of obligations before it
will impose those obligations on them. Before the law will
recognize the existence of a binding contract, there must be
· A definite offer by one party, called the offeror
· A timely acceptance by the offeree
· Some consideration must pass between the offeree and the
offeror
A widespread misconception holds that contracts must be in
writing and signed before they are enforceable in court. The

general rule is that offerees can show their acceptance of a
contract offer by any means that are “reasonable under the
circumstances.” Reasonable acceptance includes oral
agreements. Some exceptions do apply, however. For example,
sales of real property require signed writings and, in the United
States under the UCC, any contract for the sale of goods for a
price greater than $500 requires a signed agreement.
In e-business, evidence of acceptance of a contract can be a
simple click on a button saying “I accept” or “I agree.” The case
becomes more complex when the transaction involves payment
greater than $500. The relevant questions are: Is our purely
electronic communication “in writing” and have we “signed” the
agreement? The answers are as yet unresolved. No cases have
been presented regarding whether a file that exists in a
computer’s memory is “written” for purposes of contract law.
Most commentators think the answer is probably “yes,” but the
final answer will have to wait until courts have reviewed the
issue more closely.
In June 2000, President Clinton signed the Electronic Signatures
in Global and National Commerce Act (E-Sign). Basically, E-
Sign grants electronic signatures and documents equivalent
legal status with traditional handwritten signatures. It is
technology-neutral so that the parties entering into electronic
contracts can choose the system they want to use to validate an
online agreement. Many browsers contain minimal
authentication features, and companies are developing pen-
based and other types of technologies to facilitate online
contracting. In addition, a number of companies already provide
digital signature products using public key encryption methods.
The full impact of E-Sign may not be as revolutionary as some
would hope. The act specifies that no one is obligated to use or
accept electronic records or signatures—all parties must consent
to using the method. The act does not apply to a wide range of
situations, such as the creation and execution of wills,
adoptions, divorces, any notice of cancellation or termination of
utility services, or foreclosure or eviction under a credit

agreement. In addition, the marketplace has to sort out some
serious problems with varying electronic signature standards.
For example, a number of companies issue digital certificates,
but none of them can operate with the others. It would require
parties interested in adopting electronic signatures for their
business to provide several technologies or risk losing access to
some customers.
Case Example: Clickwrap Agreements
www.cli.org
On its Web site, the Cyberspace Law Institute13 offers an
interesting case. You subscribe to an electronic newsletter on a
Web site with the following text:
You may obtain a 1-year subscription to our newsletter XYZ
News for the special low price of $5.00 for each monthly issue,
simply by filling in your name and e-mail address on the form
below and then clicking the SUBSCRIBE button. By
subscribing, you agree to the terms and conditions set forth in
our Subscriber’s Contract; to read the Subscriber’s Contract,
click on CONTRACT TERMS below.
Suppose you fill in your name and e-mail address and click
SUBSCRIBE but, like most folks, you don’t actually take the
time to look at, let alone read, the Subscriber’s Contract. Do
you have a contract with XYZ?
Absolutely. You received an offer (to deliver the weekly
newsletter to you); you took a specific action that the offeror
deems to constitute acceptance of the offer (clicking on the
SUBSCRIBE button); and you agreed to pay consideration for
the contract (the offeror will deliver the newsletter to you for
$5.00 per issue).
This clickwrap contract is an example of what the law calls a
contract of adhesion—a contract that you did not really bargain
over in any way, but which was presented as more of a take-it-
or-leave-it offer. Generally speaking, adhesion contracts are
legally enforceable.
The use of the term “clickwrap contract” is an extension to the
shrinkwrap licenses used in purchased software. Mass-marketed

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